I’ve been in Richmond for a couple of weeks, and I’m not aware of any holidays.  But of course, we did just have a weekend.  So, how did my dairy free diet experiment fare this weekend?

Terribly.  I guess the problems started Saturday night when I was grilling some burgers.  We had a few people over to watch the PPV Affliction fight card (meh) and the free UFC card (good). I was grilling some of my favorite burgers, which come with cheese in them.  Although people people were just starting to arrive, the “party” had been going on for a few hours for me.  I kinda fell asleep at the wheel and burgers started to burn.  For once it wasn’t because I walked away and forgot about them!  Anyway, I shuffled some stuff around and got the flames under control, but one of the burgers was beyond hope.  It was completely charred.  I like burnt meat, so I decided instead of bringing that one in the house I’d just eat it right there.  It still hadn’t occurred to me that there was cheese in the burger.  The best part is I knew I couldn’t eat it on a bun, because there was milk in the buns!  So I stood there at the grill and ate this charred hunk of meat-cheese.  I realized what I had done about an hour later.  Oh well.

The next morning I was at the US Grappling Referee Certification seminar at Richmond BJJ.  We brought in platters of sandwiches from Costco.  There was one platter of wraps with cheese in them.  It wasn’t practical to take apart the wrap to remove the cheese.  The other platter had croissants with meat and cheese.  It was easy to take the cheese off those.   Now this was a totally different kind of diet break down.  Unlike the night before when I was just wasted and didn’t realize what I was doing, this time I made a conscious decision to eat the sandwich, sans cheese, even though I know it takes tons of butter to make croissants.  I had to eat, and I knew I was hours away from being able to get anything else.

Later that night I very nearly scooped some vanilla ice cream on to a piece of apple pie (dairy free pie) before a friend reminded me that it most certainly contained dairy.  I’m just terrible at this.

So is today day 1 again?  I’ll never get to a month!

Okay, if I publish this somewhere and people who know me read it for some reason, they’ll probably be a little freaked out at this point, so let me clear this up right now – I am not vegan, I am not vegetarian, and I still like women. I’m a hunter and a meat eater. Some background on why I’m not eating dairy: As many of you already know, I’ve been interested in the paleo diet for a couple of years now. The details of paleo diet are a little beyond the scope of this entry, but it’s mostly about eating meat, fresh fruit and vegetables, and nuts. We’ll condense the rules of the paleo down to two easy tests – before you eat something, ask 1) if I went outside seeking food could I obtain this with only primitive tools? And 2) is this safe to eat in it’s raw state (meaning, is it non-poisonous when raw, not does it contain parasites. Chicken passes this test. Potatoes do not.) Now, these rules are oversimplifications, but when you understand the finer points of paleo eating these become good guidelines. Most modern paleo eaters do not consider dairy to be acceptable.

On at least two separate occasions I’ve attempted to follow the paleo diet strictly. Once I think it lasted a couple of weeks, and that was the more successful attempt. I haven’t lost hope that someday I might be able to follow a paleo eating schedule, I’ve just come to realize that I need a new approach – slowly phasing out the unacceptable foods. To be clear, I don’t plan on ever following the paleo diet 100% – which is to say I won’t ever do it 100% of the time, and I won’t follow 100% of the rules. Dairy and soy will likely always play at least a small part in my diet.

And so I begin again the transition to a more paleo type diet. I decided to begin with dairy products because recently I’ve noticed they make me feel like crap. Every time I eat ice cream or something really cheesy I end up feeling very congested. I get a build up of pressure in my head I would normally associate with a cold. It’s gone by the next morning.

Yesterday was my first complete dairy free day. It should have been the day before yesterday, but I accidentally ate some crab rangoons with dinner. Even yesterday I was tempted to put the whole thing off another day so I could eat some creamed spinach. Man, this is going to be hard.

My favorite part of not eating dairy is going to the super market and buying vegan butter, soy milk, steaks, and bacon.

My initial goal is to stay off the dairy for 1 month. I may occasionally update some sort of journal, but that seems unlikely.

Gluten is next on the hit list.